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'Lost At Sea' Author Jon Ronson on Psychopaths, Conspiracy Theorists and Why Introverts Make The Best War Reporters

Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, who exploded into the mainstream last week with his antics on CNN, are nothing new to British journalist Jon Ronson. For his first book, “Them,” Ronson dove deep into the world of Jihadists, neo-Nazis and other extremists who believe the world is in peril from shadowy forces.

In his latest book, “Lost At Sea,” Ronson once again spends time with subjects whose beliefs diverge from the norm, like British pop star cum amateur UFO-hunter Robbie Williams. But he also delves into the skewed ideas that infect the thinking of the most ordinary among us, like the working poor’s irrational fear of wealth and the ultra-wealthy’s irrational resentment of the poor.

A writer for The Guardian, Ronson is also the author of “The Men Who Stare At Goats,” which George Clooney adapted as a movie, and “The Psychopath Test,” a New York Times bestseller. Having interviewed Ronson about that book, I was excited to receive my copy of “Lost At Sea” and to hear that he had recently relocated his family from London to New York, so I invited him to lunch to talk about both things and other topics.

That was in October. Hence the references to the then-upcoming presidential election. The good news is neither Ronson’s conversation nor his writing have lost any of their appeal in the meantime, so read our back-and-forth and then go buy his books if you haven’t already.

FORBES: Where are you from originally? Your accent is….

JR: Well, I’ve got a kind of odd accent, which doesn’t really come from anywhere. I’m originally from Wales but I don’t sound at all Welsh. If anything, I sound a bit Mancunian because for years and years I lived in Manchester, in the north of England. It’s an odd and, I have to say, slightly unsatisfying accent.

FORBES: Unsatisfying to whom?

JR: To everyone. It’s not an accent I would have designed for myself. I think everybody’s a little disappointed by this accent.

FORBES: But it makes your radio segments very distinctive.

JR: That’s true. In fact, people who are very self-conscious about their voices are very often the ones who come off the best. I love Sarah Vowell, and Starlee Kine, and David Sedaris. They’ve all got very distinctive voices.

FORBES: Even Ira Glass does. He’s got a little bit of — I don’t know if it’s a speech impediment, but he can’t say words that end in “-ct,” and every show he has to say “Ack One,” “Ack Two…”

JR: It’s nice, right? So, when I started working for them, I felt like I was fitting in because I had odd vocal inflections and it was a place where that was welcomed rather than despised.

FORBES: So, your new book. First of all, I enjoyed it greatly. Second of all, I don’t possess it anymore because I had to give it to friend. We were arguing politics, and he was on a jag about irresponsible people who took out mortgages and couldn’t pay them, and I said, ‘There’s a chapter you need to read, and there’s a reason the people who took out mortgages did and the people who didn’t didn’t, and it’s not just personal responsibility.’”

JR: Even before the crash, when that story first came out, there was a big debate about that story. Some people said I was wrong to exonerate Richard Cullen himself of blame, but I don’t think so. When you looked through his statements, there was nothing. There were no vices. This was a man who just — who slightly lost track of his finances. And the whole machine seized upon this slight helplessness to get him so tied up and so lost that he ended up killing himself. And all that stuff, those programs that determine whether you’re appropriately stupid to be offered a loan — incredible, right?

FORBES: Did you get any pushback saying your experiment of creating multiple false identities with distinctive consumption patterns and tracking the credit card offers that came for each lacked validity, that it didn’t replicate the way credit card offers are distributed in the real world?

JR: No, not really. The only negative thing I got was that one of the people behind Mosaic [the program used to identify high-value targets for credit offers] emailed me . You remember that Titch Ronson was the one who was this kind of venal perv, signing up for porn and gambling, and the guy from Mosaic asked, ‘Are you sure you didn’t spend more time being Titch Ronson than you did the others?’ So I had to think, was I going to sex shops and Nazi memorabilia stores more frequently than I was at, like, The Body Shop and Porsche showrooms. But I think I gave everybody equal time. It was just so remarkable that none of my other personas were offered anything. Titch got everything, and to this day still was.

FORBES: What do you do with the offers?

JR: Oh, anything that says Titch Ronson I just immediately chuck in the bin. I’m like one of those journalists who have to become heroin addicts to get in with the gang and then kick the habit. I can’t stop Titch getting all this junk mail from Capital One and American Express.

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